Forget the politics. What matters to me, and should matter to everyone, is that ObamaCare has always been a shit-sandwich and it remains so today. The only two things we learned from today's Supreme Court ruling, we already knew: ObamaCare was deceptively sold, and anyone looking for salvation from the Supreme Court is looking in the wrong place.
The debate all along on healthcare was flawed. The debate focused on the visible: your costs, your choices, your doctor, your insurance, and the constitutionality of the mandate. That’s understandable. Voters relate to what they can see. But what makes modern healthcare so dynamic is not the visible, and that is what will atrophy under a federal top-down system.
Virtually all the advances in healthcare we have come to take for granted: X-Rays, MRIs, arthroscopic surgery, pharmaceuticals, surgical devices, implanted defibrillators, and all the high-tech gadgets and substances one sees in a hospital, are produced by private industry. The more involved the federal government gets, the harder it becomes to make and improve these things. We won’t notice the slowing pace of advances right away. It will happen slowly and inexorably. Years from now, we won’t even realize we are dying from routine diseases which a private health system could have cured.
None of this was necessary. Every problem we have with health insurance today is already caused by government: It comes through your employer because of tax laws that allow deductibility only for employers. You can’t buy insurance across state lines due to a law called McCarran Ferguson. Medicare rate controls guarantee high inflation for non-Medicare patients. There are no limits on malpractice awards. State monopolies force residents into high-cost plans. You can’t even be charged with theft if you drive up to a hospital in a Ferrari, demand to be treated, and then refuse to pay!
ObamaCare was never about fixing those problems. ObamaCare has always been about control and power for the Democrat Party. Democrats know that once the government controls your healthcare, they control you.
This has been and still is the tragedy of ObamaCare.
